Content area
Full Text
Nigerian home videos have become an important site to study the way Nigerians communicate in the contemporary world. Various cultural elements and forms of communication associated with Nigeria are found in them. Using an innovative theory of African communication that is drawn from African philosophy, the study argues that as Africans appropriate modern technology in the way they communicate, they also maintain an orientation toward a communalistic pattern of communication. A combination of content analysis and semiotics is employed to study the major cultural themes in Saworoide, Agogo Eewo, and Afonja.
Introduction
This study examines the way Nigerians communicate today and how this can be meaningfully understood and explained. In an earlier study, I had argued that even in this first decade of the new millennium, the way Africans communicate is communalistic and that it will continue to be communalistic, albeit in a new hybridized form. To make this claim, I carried out an ethnographic study of how the Yorùba people of Nigeria interact in seven rituals of life transitions in three different socio-cultural contexts (Faniran, 2006).
If it can be said that research takes place on the interpersonal and group levels of social interaction, the present study wants to further test the same proposition by examining a different but important site of the way Africans communicate in the contemporary world - the Nigerian video films, with particular reference to its subgenre of Yorùba films. Like elsewhere in the world today, Nigerians have appropriated and continue to appropriate the new form of audiovisual medium - the video - for their own communicative ends, producing over 4,000 video films in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Edo and English languages between 1994 and 2004 (Adeoti, 2004:1). Singling out the Yoruba video films, Jonathan Haynes testifies that despite their poor technical qualities, they remain "an extraordinary example^ of popular cultural self-assertion, producing something modern out of an old tradition, speaking directly and effectively to a mass audience, without any concern for who else might be listening" (1997:23).
Although the Nigerian video films have been studied mostly from the perspective of their formal and technical qualities (Ogunleye, 2003; Haynes, 2000; Okome and Haynes, 1997), the present investigation endeavours to shift the focus from this perspective to that of the cultural...